So apparently as if by magic .Ketuanan Melayu is now a perfectly okay term to throw around.

It is not offending, frightening or dangerous to other races, because it simply means Malays being successful – and not, say, Malays being the high overlords of the subservient lesser races.

Funny then how tuan is literally translated as‘lord’ or even ‘overlord’, and ketuanan can be rendered‘lordship’.

But if you want the simplest test of whether such an arbitrary redefinition can miraculously make Ketuanan Melayu a nice, kind, gentle, cuddly, politically neutral phrase, just use the Put The Shoe On The Other Foot Technique and try these on for size:

Ketuanan Cina.

Chinese Supremacy.

Chinese Lordship.

Chinese Supreme High Overlords.

Next, let’s put this concept to the practical test. Let’s get Lim Kit Siang to shout that at the next DAP rally. Let’s have new MP Jeff Ooi open a motion on Ketuanan Cina in Parliament while simultaneously writing a series of blog posts about it.

Let’s see if Ketuanan Cina will also be considered perfectly acceptable to the general public if we just redefine it as meaning ‘Chinese being successful’.

Or if it will be rightly viewed as an intentionally outrageous, provocative and seditious statement meant to convey Chinese chauvanism and arrogance? One that lands its champions in detention without trial to preserve the peaceful multicultural equilibrium of the nation?

KUALA LUMPUR: The definition of ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy) is not about the Malays being in a position to dominate, rule over and force their power upon other races, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

He said Malay supremacy meant that the Malays, as the indigenous people in Malaysia, needed to strengthen themselves to ensure they were successful and developed.

“If they are not successful and developed, then they are not tuan (masters), therefore they will be coolies. I am sure we do not want to become coolies who do not play any role in development because we are weak and not able.

“So when we talk about that (Malay supremacy), we mean we must be successful in many fields. It is never about ruling over others, or forcing our power upon them,” he told reporters after chairing the Umno supreme council meeting last night.

Abdullah, who is also Umno president, was asked about Malay supremacy being weakened due to Barisan Nasional’s losses in the general election and because the Malays were split between Umno, PKR and PAS.

He added that there were still matters related to the Malays that needed to be further improved and enhanced, although their successes were evident.

“We are not going to be a race that dominates others. We want to be a party that represents the Malays and that is ready to co-operate for the future of Malays and the people, as Malays will also succeed when all Malaysians are successful.

“That is Malay supremacy and I hope people will understand it,” he said.

What I’ve been saying all along. I bet it also has something to do with killing more than 23,000 terrorists who went to try and screw up Iraq – terrorists who would otherwise have been blowing up cities around the world (that means where YOU and ME live) ala Bali, London Underground, Madrid etc.

Read the facts, look at the world, and admit that people in general still like the US of A… Not in spite of Iraq, but BECAUSE of Iraq!

THE US war in Iraq has strengthened its strategic position, especially in terms of key alliances, and the only way this could be reversed would be if it lost the will to continue the struggle and abandoned Iraq in defeat and disarray.

Mike Green holds the Japan chair at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies and was for several years the Asia director at the National Security Council. He is also one of America’s foremost experts on Japan and northeast Asia generally.

His thesis, applied strictly to the US position in Asia, is correct.

First, Green states and acknowledges the negatives. He writes: “The Iraq war has had one important, pernicious impact on US interests in Asia: it has consumed US attention.”

This has prevented the US from following up in sufficient detail on some positive developments in Asia. Green also acknowledges that the US’s reputation has taken a battering among Muslim populations in Asia.

Yet Green’s positive thesis is fascinating. The US’s three most important Asian alliances – with Australia, Japan and South Korea – have in his view been strengthened by the Iraq campaign. Each of these nations sent substantial numbers of troops to help the US in Iraq. They did this because they believed in what the US was doing in Iraq, and also because they wanted to use the Iraq campaign as an opportunity to strengthen their alliances with the US.

More generally, in a world supposedly awash in anti-US sentiment, pro-American leaders keep winning elections. Germany’s Angela Merkel is certainly more pro-American than Gerhard Schroeder, whom she replaced. The same is true of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

More importantly in terms of Green’s analysis, the same is also true of South Korea’s new President. Lee Myung-bak, elected in a landslide in December, is vastly more pro-American than his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

Even in majority Islamic societies, their populations allegedly radicalised and polarised by Bush’s campaign in Iraq and the global war on terror more generally, election results don’t show any evidence of these trends. In the most recent local elections in Indonesia, and in national elections in Pakistan, the Islamist parties with anti-American rhetoric fared very poorly. Similarly Kevin Rudd was elected as a very pro-American Labor leader, unlike Mark Latham, with his traces of anti-Americanism, who was heavily defeated.

Even with China, the Iraq campaign was not a serious negative for the US. Beijing was far more worried by the earlier US-led NATO intervention into Kosovo because it was based purely on notions of human rights in Kosovo. Such notions could theoretically be used to justify action (not necessarily military action) against China over Taiwan and Tibet. Iraq, on the other hand, was justified on the basis of weapons of mass destruction, a justification with which the Chinese were much more comfortable.

More generally, it is American values, or more accurately the universal values of democracy to which the US adheres, that are more popular and receive greater adherence in Asia than before, in the politics and civil societies of Asian nations such as Indonesia, India, Japan and many others.

The overall picture is infinitely more complex than the anti-Bush narrative of the Iraq war would suggest.

Similarly, it seems clear that US standing in Japan declined most recently when it softened its position on North Korea, something international liberal opinion universally demanded. However, some other facts are incontrovertible. Japan in 2003 sent 600 troops to Iraq to help the Americans. The Japanese leader who did this, Junichiro Koizumi, was subsequently re-elected in a landslide.

The US’s standing there seems to bear very little relation to Iraq. However, as noted, a pro-US candidate won a record landslide in December. But even the previous president, who did deploy some anti-American rhetoric, sent 3600 troops to Iraq (more than any nation except the US and Britain) and negotiated a free trade agreement with the US. Moreover, as Green describes, there has been a big rise in the positive ratings of the US in South Korea since 2005.

The centrist Joong AngIlbo newspaper’s poll shows the US rising from being the third most popular foreign country in South Korea to becoming, by 2006, the most popular foreign country.

Green cautions that a US failure in Iraq, a retreat and leaving chaos in Iraq behind, would gravely damage US credibility in Asia.

The world works as well as it does–and, granted, that’s pretty marginal–in large part because the United States guarantees the security of its allies. Places like Taiwan and South Korea churn out magic toilets and miniature automobiles knowing that the United States will respond to incursions and aggression with overwhelming and sustained force. So far, our defense of the fledgling Iraqi government has confirmed that arrangement.

America does what it says. If you have an American security guarantee–and I’m looking at you,Saudi Arabia and Pakistan–you don’t need to build a nuclear arsenal. America honors its commitments, and the world keeps ticking–well, arrhythmically stuttering, anyhow–because there are big U.S. guns ready to retaliate against aggression. No better friend. No worse enemy. If America is backing you, you’re golden.

a political position or principle asserting that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees and their descendants, have a right to return to the homes and villages they left or were forced out of in Palestine (currently Israel and Palestinian territories) as result of the 1948 Palestine war and the 1967 Six-Day war.

But also to their children born outside of Israel, and their children’s children, and their wives and relatives, and anyone even remotely related to them no matter how many generations removed – never mind if they’ve never set eyes on the actual land itself.

About, oh, 4 million of them.

This combined with the explosive birth rate of Palestinians would, of course, result in Israel no longer being majority Jewish. The Jews would be voted out of their own nation.

But let me say that I, the uber neocon slave to the Ziono-Imperialists (see bottom of here), fully support the Palestinian right of return…

As long as the Jewish right of return is also recognized.

That is, everyone who is a Jewish refugee from Israel is given automatic citizenship.

As well as their children born outside of Israel, and their children’s children, and their wives and relatives, and anyone even remotely related to them no matter how many generations removed – never mind if they’ve never set eyes on the actual land itself.

About, oh, 13.2 million of them – that is, every single Jewish person on the planet.

Oh, and speaking of historic rights, related from a Bible reading I came across:

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.” I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me.

They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began this good work.

But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem theArab heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. “What is this you are doing?” they asked. “Are you rebelling against the king?”

I answered them by saying, “The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding, but as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.”

What are the odds of that? Not only that, somehow Alexander manages to title his post ‘Stealing For God’ which would require linking two disparate and unconnected posts (one about matters of religion, and one about Middle East politics that doesn’t even mention God)… Just as theism did in the comments.

And how did he know about theism’s blog, when theism never even left his blog address on the comments he made at my posts?

Not to mention that the new blog ‘theism’ has only one recent, incoherent posting at the time of this comment, which makes it incredibly unlikely that Alexander the Great came across it through Google search:

So at the very least, the two of them are closely affiliated.

At the worst, they are one and the same person – which means that Alexander the Not-so-great has engaged in immoral sock puppetry by using multiple aliases while pretending (and even intentionally greatly attempting to convince others) that they are not all him.

But look closer at the only person in the YOONIVARSE who notices that such a new and content-less blog as theism’s even exists, on the very day that its existence came into being:

They’re practically married and under the sheets in the hotel room! Ewwwww!

Therefore, after reviewing the circumstantial evidence as summarized below:

Alexander posts on the same two topics theism was prodding me about (and not any other of my plentiful insulting/antagonistic posts),

Alexander cites a ‘new blog’ by theism that has only one odd post and no other content,

The new post at theism is posted only one day before Alexander’s post bashing me,

The new post does not even mention my two posts that commentor theism made his remarks on, yet Alexander can manage to pick up just those two of my posts,

Alexander managed to find said theism blog despite its being newborn and having no content (even though I couldn’t because theism never posted his blog address in his comments on my blog), and

Alexander is the only commentor on theism’s single post, on the very day theism creates that post,

I conjecture that Alexander intentionally created the theism blog in order to ‘legitimately’ attack me in his blog on the exact same items that commentor theism has been attacking me on.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who led troops in Iraq for the past year, will be nominated by President Bush to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.

Gates said he expected Petraeus to make the shift in late summer or early fall. The Pentagon chief also announced that Bush will nominate Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno to replace Petraeus in Baghdad.

Central Command oversees the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

“I am honored to be nominated for this position and to have an opportunity to continue to serve with America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and civilians,” Petraeus said in a brief statement from Baghdad.

At a hastily arranged Pentagon news conference, Gates said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other problems in the Central Command area of responsibility, demand knowledge of how to fight counterinsurgencies as well as other unconventional conflicts.

“I don’t know anybody in the U.S. military better qualified to lead that effort,” he said, referring to Petraeus.

GOP presidential hopeful John McCain, R-Ariz., said he supports both Petraeus and Odierno. He called Petraeus “one of the great generals in American history.”

Gates said he had consulted with Levin and other senior lawmakers about the nominations. The defense secretary said he anticipated no Capitol Hill obstacles to confirmation.

Asked if moving Petraeus from the Iraq command could interrupt momentum against the insurgency, Gates said that by waiting until late summer or early fall he hoped to “ensure plenty of time to prepare for a good handoff.” He said it also would help that Odierno has had experience as “Petraeus’ right-hand man” over the last year.

If confirmed by the Senate, Petraeus would replace Navy Adm. William Fallon, who abruptly stepped down in March after a magazine reported that he was at odds with President Bush over Iran policy. Fallon said the report was not true but had become a distraction.

Petraeus, 55, is widely hailed by the Bush administration and members of Congress for implementing a new strategy in Iraq, including the deployment of some 30,000 additional troops, that dramatically improved security.

Central Command, whose headquarters is at Tampa, Fla., is responsible for U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, and thus oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about “GoArmy.com.”

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda’s brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big “kinetic” military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The sun was setting over Nineveh as four terrorists driving tons of explosives closed on their targets. The terrorists drove their trucks straight into the hearts of the communities.

The shockwave from detonation far outpaced the speed of sound. Buildings and humans were ripped apart and hurled asunder, turning a wedding party into hundreds of funerals.

But the attacks were not over. Yezidi men grabbed their rifles, and while two more truck bombs rumbled toward Qahtaniya and Jazeera, a hail of Yezidi bullets met them. The defenders who fired the bullets were killed with honor while standing between evil and their people. Two other truck bombs detonated on the outskirts of the villages.

Until recently, such terror attacks inside Iraq could have coerced the village into sheltering Al Qaeda. Yet this time, the “jihadists” got an unexpected reception. Local men grabbed their rifles and poured fire on the demons, slaughtering them. Nineteen terrorists were destroyed.

Times have changed for al Qaeda here. Too many Iraqis have decided they are not going to take it anymore.

The young men come to Iraq to fight like infantry soldiers, only to find themselves terrorized into wearing suicide vests.

In 2005, I wrote about a young Libyan who was happy to have been captured by American “Deuce Four” soldiers in Nineveh because Iraqis were mistreating him and trying to force him blow up some Mosul police. Like many foreign fighters, the Libyan was not hardcore. He was so grateful to be captured that he began telling his entire sad story.

The best thing about foreign fighters is that, contrary to myth, often they do not want to die, and when they get caught, they blab everything.

The Predator peered down on the terrorists planting the bomb. There were too many targets for one Hellfire missile, and it’s better to conserve the weapon when possible, since the Predator must fly far to reload.

A group of four Kiowa Warrior pilots were only a few minutes away from the enemy, but their helicopters were on the ground and the engines were cold, while the pilots were waiting in a building near the runway, playing Guitar Hero to pass the time.

A soldier interrupted the Guitar Hero session, telling the pilots to get in the air. Orders would come over the radio. The pilots abandoned Guitar Hero and raced out the door into the cold night to their OH-58D Kiowa Warriors, economy-sized helicopters that would make a Ford Pinto seem spacious.

Lopez and Boise could not see the enemy, but the Predator could, and so they set up for a “remote” Hellfire shot, meaning they would fire the weapon “blind” in the direction of the target, and the missile would “lock” onto the laser reflection as it approached.

The Predator was lazing the target, invisibly marking the group of six men. Boise launched the Hellfire…

VROOOSSHHHH!!!!!

The Predator was striking the gavel for the Hellfire to deliver justice, but the terrorists apparently realized the verdict a fraction of a second too late. The detonation appeared silently on the Predator thermal, while seconds later the sounds of the explosion rumbled over the base. The remains of the terrorists glowed hot on the infrared imagery.

Total time from playing Guitar Hero to getting airborne and delivering justice was an astounding twelve minutes. Apparently at least five terrorists were killed, while at least one escaped, though he probably needs new eardrums and might ask for a raise before trying that again.

He was dressed as a woman as he walked down the alley toward the mosque full of worshippers. It was Friday, just before Ashura, and the air was chilled.

The bomb strapped to his body was studded with ball-bearings so that he could kill more villagers as they gathered for prayer. The detonation would eviscerate and dismember those closest, shattering bones into fragments, but the ball-bearings would ensure lethality beyond the percussive edge of the blast wave, ripping through the flesh of people who might not have been knocked down by the explosion.

There were no soldiers in his path to stop him; no police to alert to the man in women’s clothes. There were only villagers. The man dressed as a woman was to be the agent of their deaths. He kept walking down the alley toward the mosque where more than one hundred people were praying, a mass murderer masquerading in a woman’s garb.

The closer a counterfeit comes to the genuine article, the more obvious the deceit. As the murderer dressed in women’s clothes walked purposefully toward his target, there was a village man ahead.

But under the guise of a simple villager was a true Martyr, and he, too, had his target in sight. The Martyr had seen through the disguise, but he had no gun. No bomb. No rocket. No stone. No time.

The Martyr walked up to the murderer and lunged into a bear hug, on the spot where we were now standing.

Unproven claims successfully disguised as facts in the media can be persistent obstacles to finding the truth. Once something is put in print, it becomes referenced as fact by other people who seldom check the source.

So it was for the thwarted bomb attack in this village, which quickly found its way into media reports, described as yet another incident of sectarian violence, which on some level it was.

In front of the walls pocked with craters from the ball bearings, truth was more nuanced. But apparently no journalists visited the village to find out what really happened and what it tells us about the people who live here.

The insurgency arose in Fallujah before spreading to the rest of the country. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the insurgents—now on the run elsewhere in Iraq—were first beaten here in the City of Mosques.

Many Fallujans initially welcomed Zarqawi and his lieutenants as liberators from the hated American occupiers. But the jihadists did not fight for freedom. Instead, they enforced Islamic law at the point of a gun, establishing a brand of fascism even worse than Saddam’s. They murdered sheikhs who opposed them. They butchered their enemies’ families, burning women alive and slashing children’s throats with kitchen knives, and massacred other families for accepting food from Marines. City officials, tribal authorities, police officers—anyone in charge of anything was targeted for destruction.

By late 2006, Fallujans had had enough. Though they had little desire to be ruled, or even nurtured into self-rule, by Americans, the jihadist alternative was clearly worse. So Fallujah formed an alliance with its former enemies. The alliance is one of convenience, and possibly temporary, but it was forged in the crucible of the most wrenching catastrophe Fallujans have experienced in living memory.

While the Americans were lucky, in a sense, that al-Qaida so thoroughly disgusted the locals, Petraeus’s strategy shift was crucial to beating the insurgents. Before the surge, American counterinsurgency had followed a “light footprint” model: soldiers and Marines lived on large protected bases and did everything they could to avoid casualties. The thinking was that this approach not only protected the military; it also would keep Iraqis from viewing Americans as oppressive occupiers. But the light footprint model prevented the Americans from providing security to Iraqis, who began to regard their occupiers as not merely oppressive but incompetent to boot.

When Petraeus surged additional troops to Iraq in January 2007, the light footprint model was replaced with aggressive counterinsurgency operations that, perhaps counterintuitively, prioritized the protection of local civilians over American forces.

U.S. Marines and Iraqi police have forged a straightforward agreement with civilians: we’ll keep you safe if you identify insurgents and lead us to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and weapons caches.

The Marines’ final mission is the make-or-break mission, as all final missions must be. The third battle for Fallujah will be decisive. After the Americans leave, the city will either transform into a relatively normal backwater that nobody cares about—or tear itself apart. If Fallujah goes, Baghdad goes, and all of Iraq will follow.

“We’re trained as infantrymen,” Captain Stewart Glenn said. “But here we are doing civil administration and trying to get the milk factory up and running.”

“We make up all this stuff as we go,” Lieutenant Mike Barefoot added.

While most Americans go to school, work traditional day jobs, and raise their families, young American men and women like these are deployed to Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan where they work seven days a week rebuilding societies torn to pieces by fascism, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and war. It is not what they signed up to do. Some may have geeked out on nation-building video games like Civilization, but none of the enlisted men picked up any of these skills in boot camp.

Just down the street from Lieutenant Bibler’s station is a massive construction site. A local Iraqi contracting company is building a water treatment plant with American money.

Solar-powered street lights are being erected all over Fallujah to take strain off the failing electrical grid and keep the city well-lit during outages. Locals are hired to pick up trash that accumulated during the periods of heavy fighting, and new weekly garbage collection contracts are being awarded. The city government is being rebuilt from scratch. Micro loans are given to local shopkeepers to jumpstart the economy.

“We hire day laborers for twelve dollars a day to clean up certain areas,” Captain Steve Eastin said. The average monthly salary in Fallujah is around 300 dollars, so twelve dollars a day isn’t as stingy as it may sound. “We’re paying to have the mosques repaired. Iraqi Police Chief Colonel Faisal helped convince the imams to trust us. He’s well-educated and speaks the language of justice and democracy.”

Every mosque in the city was anti-American during the peak of the insurgency, but every single one has flipped in the meantime. Every day the imams exhort the people of Fallujah to support the American effort. The Marines know this because they have Arabic-speakers who sit in and listen to what gets said.

Combat operations are finished in Fallujah, but this was still a mission of war. If the Marines and city leaders cannot get Fallujah back on its feet, the city could fall again to the insurgency

The ideology of AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] is to establish the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq,” he said. “In order for them to be successful they must control the Iraqi population through either support or coercion.

Al Qaeda was initially welcomed by many Iraqis in Ramadi because they said they were there to fight the Americans. The spirit of resistance against foreign occupiers was strong. But the Iraqis got a lot more in the bargain than simply resistance.

“Al Qaeda came in and just seized people’s houses,” said Army Captain Phil Messer from Nashville, Tennessee. “They said we’re taking your house to use it against the Americans. Get out.”

“Market Street [the main street downtown] was completely controlled by Al Qaeda,” Lieutenant Welch said. “They rolled down the streets, pointed guns at people, and said we are in charge. They had crazy requirements for the locals. They weren’t allowed to cut their hair. Girls were banned from going to school. They couldn’t shave or smoke. One guy defiantly lit a cigarette and they shot him four times.”

There was another soccer field north of the city in the ‘Sofia’ area,” he said, “a kids’ soccer field. It was also used as a dump site. AQI killed civilians by castrating them, stuffing their genitals in their mouths, and cutting off their heads. Al Qaeda killed a lot more civilians than they ever killed soldiers.”

Captain Jay McGee concurred. “Suicide car bombers rarely attacked the coalition,” he said, meaning Americans. “They almost always attacked Iraqi security forces and civilians. They know the U.S. will leave eventually, but AQI ultimately must fight Iraqis and destroy Iraqi institutions in order to prevail.”

“One night,” Lieutenant Markham said, “after several young people were beheaded by Al Qaeda, the mosques in the city went crazy. The imams screamed jihad from the loudspeakers. We went to the roof of the outpost and braced for a major assault. Our interpreter joined us. Hold on, he said. They aren’t screaming jihad against us. They are screaming jihad against the insurgents.”

“A massive anti-Al Qaeda convulsion ripped through the city,” said Captain McGee. “The locals rose up and began killing the terrorists on their own. They reached the tipping point where they just could not take any more. They told us where the weapon caches were. They pointed out IEDs under the road.”

“In mid-March,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “a sniper operating out of a house was shooting Americans and Iraqis. Civilians broke into his house, beat the hell out of him, and turned him over to us.”

“One day,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “some Al Qaeda guys on a bike showed up and asked where they could plant an IED against Americans. They asked a random civilian because they just assumed the city was still friendly to them. They had no idea what was happening. The random civilian held him at gunpoint and called us to come get him.”

It must be the fault of those Imperialist, Colonialist, Zionist, Racist, Apartheid Crusaders!

They are to blame for beginning this inhumane Christian occupation of rightfully Muslim lands that continues today in the form of the Colonial powers, the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the existence of the State of Israel.

That’s what Muslim apologists and hate-ranting imams/national leaders will tell you. And they are obviously totally unbiased and without political motives, so what they say MUST be true and unquestionably factual!

So let’s count the dates up to the Crusades, shall we?

——————————————-

634 A.D. Muslim invasion of Byzantine Christian Empire – Arab Muslims attack, invade and occupy Christian Syria, Armenia, Egypt, North Africa, Asia Minor, Crete and Sicily, and attempt to conquer the Byzantine Christian Empire’s capital Constantinople in Christian Turkey, until 1169 A.D. Many of these remain under Muslim occupation up to this very day.

846 A.D. Muslim Saracen sacking of Rome – Saracen Muslims attack, invade and pillage Rome, the very capital of the Christian church at that time. The unholy, sacrilegeous, disrespectful defilers rob the sacred relics of the Basilica of Saint Peter and Basilica of Saint Paul, but fail to breach the walls of the city. (Kudos to Eric Mudasi for insipiring this addition.)

1064 A.D. Muslim invasion of West Asia – Turkish Muslims attack, invade and occupy Asia Minor and Syria, until 1308. However, later events cause them to remain under Muslim occupation today.

1095 A.D. The First Crusade – First Crusade begins. Campaign is limited to retaking formerly Christian lands. Today, all the territory reclaimed from Muslim occupiers during the Crusades has returned to Muslim occupation – except for Israel, which has been returned to Jewish rule after 2500 years of occupation by various factions, including centuries of Muslim subjugation.

——————————————-

So according to jihadi apologists, all the suicide bombings, hostage taking, journalist beheading and general terrorism against noncombatants is justified by the Western Christian ‘invasions’ of ‘sovereign Muslim’ lands which began with the ‘illegal Crusades’.

And even though 50% of all the Christians in the world at the time of the 7th-century were wiped out in the next three centuries by the Muslim jihadists…:

– The church’s heartland at that time was the Middle East and Northern Africa (now almost completely dominated by Islam)
– 3200 churches were wiped out in North Africa
– 10,000 church buildings were destroyed in the century preceding the First Crusade

Because obviously, the Americano-Zionists used their demonictime-travel spells and godless capitalist technology to warp space-time and make the 1095 A.D. First Crusade happen before Islam was even founded.

Yes, it is obviously all the Western Christian Imperialists Crusaders’ fault. At the behest of their Elders of Zionism masters.

Full list of ‘Western Christian acts of first-aggression’ at this Wikipedia.

On a tip from wits0, Four Myths about the Crusades which are: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world; Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich; Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives; The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

The Crusades were a response to the desecration of the Christian shrines in the Holy Land, the destruction of churches, and the general persecution of Christians in the Near East. A Crusade to be considered legitimate had to fulfill strict criteria; one did not enter into it lightly for self aggrandizement. There had to be a legally sound reason. It was, in other words, waged for purposes of repelling violence or injury and the imposition of justice on wrongdoers. A Crusade was never a war of conversion, rather a rightful attempt to recover Christian territory which had been injuriously seized in the past. Only a recognized authority could formally declare a Crusade, and it had to be waged justly.

…the Crusades were a reaction against over three hundred years of jihad when the Eastern Christians were persecuted, and hundreds of churches destroyed… the conver­sion of the magnificent Byzantine Hagia Sophia into a mosque, (though admittedly this took place after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453—it was a mosque from 29 May 1453 until 1931…

I can only adumbrate the situation in the Holy Land a hundred years before Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 for a crusade to liberate Palestine. The cruelties of Caliph al-Hakim have been recorded by Christian and Muslim historians. In 1003, al-Hakim began the persecution of Jews and Christians in earnest. Historian Ibn al-Dawadari tells us that the first move in a series of acts was the destruc­tion of the church of St. Mark. Al-Musabbihi, a contemporary, recounts that the Christians built this church without a permit—the building of new churches was not permitted. The Al-Rashida mosque was built in its place, eventually extending over, and desecrating Jewish and Christian cemeteries; surely an act of vandalism. The height of al-Hakim’s cruelties was the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also known as the Church of the Resurrection, possibly the most revered shrine in Christendom, since it is considered by Christians as Golgotha, (the Hill of Calvary), where the New Testament says that Jesus was crucified, and even the place where Jesus was buried, and hence, of course, the site of the Resurrection. He ordered dismantled “the Church of the Resurrection to its very foundations, apart from what could not be destroyed or pulled up, and they also destroyed the Golgotha and the Church of St. Constantine and all that they contained, as well as all the sacred grave-stones. They even tried to dig up the graves and wipe out all traces of their existence. Indeed they broke up and uprooted most of them. They also laid waste to a con­vent in the neighbourhood….The authorities took all the other property belonging to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its pious foundations, and all its furnishings and treasures.”6 According to Muslim sources the destruction began in September, 1007 C.E. “Most of the Muslim sources view the destruction as a reaction to its magnificence and the fact that it was a world centre for Christian pilgrims, among them many Christians from Egypt; to the splendid processions that were held in the streets of Jerusalem, and to the ‘Paschal fire’….”7

…

Many believe that modern Muslims have inherited from their me­dieval ancestors memories of crusader violence and destruction. But nothing could be further from the truth.18 By the four­teenth century, in the Islamic world the Crusades had almost passed out of mind. Muslims had lost interest, and, in any case, they “looked back on the Crusades with indifference and complacency. In their eyes they had been the outright winners. They had driven the crusaders from the lands they had settled in the Levant and had been triumphant in the Balkans, occupying far more territory in Europe than the Western settlers had ever held in Syria and Palestine.”

A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered, today casually called the “Islamic world” — including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India and China — much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the sword of Islam.

In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim Arab raiders; some 700 years later, in 1453, Christendom’s other great basilica, Constantinople’s Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks, permanently.

The few European regions that escaped direct Islamic occupation due to their northwest remoteness include Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. That, of course, does not mean that they were not attacked by Islam. Indeed, in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland, Christians used to pray that God save them from the “terror of the Turk.” These fears were not unfounded since as late as 1627 Muslim corsairs raided the Christian island, seizing four hundred captives and selling them in the slave markets of Algiers.

Nor did America escape. A few years after the formation of the United States, in 1800, American trading ships in the Mediterranean were plundered and their sailors enslaved by Muslim corsairs. The ambassador of Tripoli explained to Thomas Jefferson that it was a Muslim’s “right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”

In short, for roughly one millennium — punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing — Islam daily posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western civilization.

…

Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the “suffocating” forces of Christianity? Or were these dark ages — which “coincidentally” occurred during the same centuries when jihad was constantly harrying Europe — a product of another suffocating religion? Was the Spanish Inquisition a reflection of Christian barbarism or was it a reflection of Christian desperation vis-à-vis the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who, while claiming to have converted to Christianity, were practicing taqiyya and living as moles trying to subvert the Christian nation back to Islam?

Summary of Me

scottthongblog[at]yahoo[dot]com

Seeking truth, hating lies.

Oh my labels!

Free thinking, but not a Free Thinker.
A Christian and a scientist, but not a Christian Scientist.
Believing in a universal church, but not a Catholic.
Trying to be a saint in these latter days, but not a Latter Day Saint.
A witness for Jehovah, but not a Jehovah's Witness.
Sumitted to God, but not a Muslim.
Seeking knowledge, but not a Gnostic.
Rational in thinking, but not a Rationalist.
Upholding humanity, but not a Humanist.
A supporter of liberation, but not a Liberal.
A supporter of democracy, but not a Democrat.
Acknowledging the importance of social values, but not a Socialist.
Seeking and valuing truth, but not a Truther.